Like nearly all Buddhist teachings, there are practices you can do to develop these faculties. For example, you can reflect that all beings have at one time or another been your mother, or your child; realizing this, how can you feel hatred towards any other being?
It doesn't work for me, of course; I don't believe in rebirth.
Imo the belief in rebirth is not needed to practice metta, you just need to realize that every being wants to be happy, just like you.
Yet all of them are mired in delusion and most of the time do things which go the opposite way of generating real happiness, we all do.
Everyone is mired in delusion and most of the time react to feelings of anger and craving (vedana), which are generated based on their history, social norms and whatnot. They are just being manipulated by those all the time, unless they're very mindful of what's happening in their mind temporarily. Realizing this you can't really hate anybody, and in fact you realize they are 100% like you.
> the belief in rebirth is not needed to practice metta
That's not what I was saying; I was commenting on that suggested technique for developing metta, in particular, which is dependent on belief in rebirth.
Yeah, I don't buy the "remembering past lives" business, but "life after death" seems like a physical certainty if you're not necessarily attached to the "self"[1]. I suppose it's sort of how life works, on our planet anyway, for the last two billion years when we invented sex to outpace the viruses. Some sort of sentient planetary slime mold might have different ideas.
One thing that's interesting is that Indian philosophy of the 800-400 BCE era had a concept congruous to the Greek atomos, the kanu. One of the neat things about kanu is that it knows where it's been, in a moral sense. This was posited as one explanation for reincarnation, all your bits fly around according to these moral laws, creating new points of awareness. Bad people burn all their energy whoring around, drinking, eating, so the kanu don't have a place to go (pigs, lower castes, etc), but good people spread their lives around, and kanu get higher life forms to coalesce into (brahmins, nice people, gods, etc). Obviously there's no morals at the Planck length, but it's an interesting notion.
Auschwitz ashes in our lungs, tears of Christ in our blood. One of Buddha's "memories" of past lives was as a man who sacrificed himself to feed a starving tiger and cubs. I've always thought that locking corpses in eternal tupperware was a little creepy.
Always keep in mind, though, at the heart of a lot of Indian philosophy is a certain brutality. I mean, the word for heaven is "non-existence"; as an old professor of mine[2] once quipped, "that's a perfectly reasonable posture if you've ever been to Bangalore". The entire notion of "higher" and "lower" life forms - including different kinds of PEOPLE - sort of gives away the game. Important to remember that AAALLL of these old systems were built to justify the civilization they emerged from, and it wasn't always purty.
[1] Whatever that is. Some sort of recursive system that simulates outcomes for a given range of choices? That seems way too pat.
[2] Who was also a minister, so there's that. He already believed in a Big Rock Candy Mountain with fluffy beards and chubby wingbabies.
Regarding "the self": Buddhism is seriously conflicted about that idea. The self is said to be illusory, but we constantly apply all of our energies to defending it. Why do they go on so much about it, if it isn't real?
It's been described to me as a pathetic, insignificant thing, absolutely in need of a defender. Western (or I should say, english-speaking) Buddhist teachers call it "ego", but I'm pretty sure that's wrong, in that Freud and Jung coined the term "ego" (they had different definitions, but it's not the self from Buddhism that either of them defined).
For traditional Buddhists, the experience of "self" or atta is considered an illusion, like a mirage, or perhaps a rainbow. The argument is that the phenomenological world is impermanent and formless, so the things that we experience via the senses are not representative of the "real stuff" out there. The self is built on these, so itself is also impermanent, and not an eternal quality. It's not bad exactly - later traditions posit that these aggregates or skandas of the self are the root of personality - but clinging to the impermanent self or samsaric phenomenon is, well, the root of suffering. And Buddha's all about suffering; if hypocrisy was Christ's kryptonite, then suffering is definitely the Shakya Buddha's. There's also another word for "self" that identifies with a sort of universal self, which is actually eternal, but it's also completely incomprehensible, by definition of its being infinite. And there's a whole bunch of later traditions. It's a lot to unpack.
I'd recommend picking up a good survey, some I remember as an undergrad were :
The First Cities, D. Hamblin
The Wonder that was India, A. Bassam
Indian Atheism, D. Chattopadhyaya, who also did a survey on Lokayata, an early Materialist movement in the subcontinent.
It's a useful shared illusion, but not 'real' once you reach a certain level of meditative concentration.
If you look at a bicycle wheel in motion, you don't see the spokes. If you and everyone you knew had only ever seen wheels in motion, you'd talk about a semi transparent field from the centre to the rim. You would all describe the same phenomena.
I was at a meditation retreat, and I caught a glimpse of the spokes. That's how I've explained it to others.
Does the self seem real? Yes. Is it a useful construct? Can we predict it and manipulate it? Yes. Once you've followed the meditation practices, do you see that it's an illusion? That was absolutely my experience.
Which is a round about way of saying, the conflict you perceive in Buddhism is rooted in the ongoing struggle to perceive the nature of the self, and to notice when your practice becomes entangled in its illusions.
> For example, you can reflect that all beings have at one time or another been your mother, or your child; realizing this, how can you feel hatred towards any other being?
What's the exact cosmology again?
1. Every being is likely to be your mother
2. Every being has been your mother with certainty (beginningless time)
Buddhist cosmology holds that the cycle of rebirth is endless, so all beings have been your mother and your child at some time in the past, and will be again in the future.
So it's 2.
And for clarity, the view is that time is both beginningless and endless.
Well, honestly I don't know. If I had feelings of loving kindness, I'd know that; but that would be just feelings. I don't have a loving-kindness detector, and I wouldn't know how to calibrate it if I did.
I suppose one could work from hatred; people generally know if they hate something. So if one has reduced the incidence of hatred, then perhaps you could say the technique worked. I used the technique (along with others) over a period of a couple of decades, during which I "suspended belief" concerning rebirth. But over a couple of decades, it's quite possible that my personality changed for other reasons - such as other techniques, or watching my children grow up, or simply maturing.
Sorry, but I don't think metta amounts to feeling "a bit happier" or "being in a good mood".
Metta is one of the four Brahma Viharas (foundations of Brahma). Another is karuna, or compassion; wishing others not to suffer. The standard practice in Tibet for generating compassion is called tong len ("sending and receiving", sorry, I don't know any Sanskrit word for it). You imagine someone else's suffering as a black cloud, breathe it in, and breathe out all your goodness and happiness as a white cloud, which you imagine going into them. It's a simple bolt-on for ordinary meditation on the breath. [Edit] If you have a real, suffering person to practise on, I was told that helps a lot.
Practising tong len is liable to cause depression in the practitioner, or so I was told. It's not tantric, you don't need permission to do it; but it's probably not a good idea to try it unless you have an experienced meditation instructor.
"Feeling good" is not a sign of progress in meditation.
I'm sure there are well established practices in Tibet but IMO there is nothing special about them, which is why there are multiple schools of Buddhism instead of just one.
I had a real suffering person to practice on (me) which is why I'm quite certain about what I wrote. If you have capability to improve your mood on demand, your entire approach to life changes. You can be selfless, take risk, work long hours, even if entire world collapses, you will always have metta to support you. This is how I understand equanimity at the moment.
I can't help but feel happiness and goodwill for a cute cat or bunny. Once I have that feeling, I can pay attention to it, keep it going, sit with it, or wish that feeling for myself or to others. If I lose it, I just bring up an endearing image or thought of the cat/bunny/my kiddo and pay attention to that feeling again.
Both of my "children" are adults in their 30s; either of them could kill me with their bare hands if they chose to.
I don't think loving kindness manifests when I smile at someone; I think it manifests when I forgive them for some outrage that has left me seething. That is, I don't associate loving-kindness particularly with good feelings.
> Both of my "children" are adults in their 30s; either of them could kill me with their bare hands if they chose to.
My friend, if this is truly the state of your relationship with your children then I'm so sorry. I wish you a swift resolution to any and all ill-will.
> I don't think loving kindness manifests when I smile at someone; I think it manifests when I forgive them for some outrage that has left me seething. That is, I don't associate loving-kindness particularly with good feelings.
It sounds like loving-kindness practices don't work particularly well for you but forgiveness does so that's great. Still, I hope you get to feel a sense of warm-heartedness toward yourself and others. Even the Dalai Lama, one of the preeminent Buddhist figures in the world, says his true religion is kindness.
> Warm-heartedness is my favourite subject. As human beings our mothers gave birth to us and we survived because of her care and affection. Warm-heartedness is not only the key factor for human survival, it’s also the basis for being able to live as peaceful, happy human beings.
It doesn't work for me, of course; I don't believe in rebirth.